I recently was thinking about what impact evaluations in development can tell us about poverty reduction. On one level this is a ridiculous question. Most of the impact evaluations out there are designed to look at interventions to improve people's lives and the work is done in developing countries, so it follows that we are making poor people's lives better, right? That's less obvious.

Impact Evaluations are just one of many important tools to improve “adaptive capacity.” To improve implementation, they need to be integrated with monitoring and decision support systems, methods to understand mechanisms of change, and efforts to build feedback loops that pay attention both to everyday and long-term learning. While there has been some scholarly writing and advocacy on this point, it has been more talk than action.

The old saw goes: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But what if the best way to fix your broken policy is actually a bolt? I was recently at a workshop where someone was presenting preliminary results of an evaluation cash transfer program which, while perhaps started with social protection kind of objectives in mind, actually seems to have had impacts on business creation and revenues that dwarfed your average business training program or microfinance program.

Our series on institutional approaches to impact evaluation continues! DI recently virtually sat down with Jeannie Annan, Director of Research and Evaluation at the International Rescue Committee.

DI: What is the overall approach to impact evaluation at the IRC?
JA: We are committed to providing (or supporting) the most effective and cost-effective interventions. This means using the best available research about what works combined with understanding of the context and experience in implementation to design and deliver our programs.

In our continuing series on discussing institutional approaches to impact evaluation, DI virtually sat down with Jack Molyneaux, Director of Independent Evaluations at the Millennium Challenge Corporation. (Please note that these are Jack’s opinions, not that of the MCC)

DI: Impact Evaluation seems to be something that's pretty important at the MCC. Can you tell us a bit about how this focus came about?
JM: Since its inception MCC’s mandate has included demonstrating results. Rigorous impact evaluations have always been a key component of that mandate.

Aid Thoughts discusses new work on the value of daycare in Brazilian slums.

A new From Evidence to Policy note looks at the long-term impact of a conditional cash transfer on education in Colombia-part of the analysis uses admin data on test scores for graduating students – “students whose families received cash grants were between 4 and 8.4 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school; but Students whose families received the cash grants didn’t score higher on the national standardized achievement test given a year before graduation”.

Funding opportunity: The World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) has a new call for proposals for work on basic education, water and sanitation, early childhood development, and health systems. Details here.

Funding opportunity:3ie has funding available under an agricultural innovation thematic window. This grant window will fund up to 16 new impact evaluations of interventions in the areas of knowledge transfer, contractual arrangements, adoption, and soil health

Randomization might- at first – sound like a scary word for health policy makers and professionals. They read medical journals and know from their training that randomized trials are scientifically rigorous designs to evaluate the impact of a program. But their first inclination might be to prefer to have the randomized trial in somebody else’s backyard. Randomization seems politically difficult. How to explain it to the people who will have to wait for the new intervention? Will it not create a backlash with the people who are randomly assigned to the control group? How will the population be convinced that the random allocation was fair and that there were no back room deals?

Our experience in many countries is that public randomization ceremonies are an excellent platform to build support for randomization and for the entire impact evaluation process. In Cameroon, we organized public randomization ceremonies in three Regions to assign health facilities to four study groups in an impact evaluation of performance-based financing (PBF) in the health sector. Held in the regional capitals and combined with the official launching of the project in each Region, we invited representatives of each facility, district health management teams, and local government, who all took part themselves in the randomization. Each of the randomization ceremonies received close oversight from the central and regional levels of the Ministry of Public Health. This made the randomization process completely fair and transparent to all health facilities participating in the study.

Today I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a new initiative that the Africa Region and the Research Group at the World Bank are launching today. The idea here is that we don't know enough about how to effectively address the underlying causes of gender inequality. Let me start by explaining what I mean by underlying causes. Take the case of female farmers. There is a lot of literature out there which shows that women have lower agricultural yields than men. And some of it shows that this is because women have lo